Citizen of Nowhere

The unicorns and the ghost in the wall

Leonora Carrington. The unicorns and the ghost in the wall

I try to imagine what they are thinking, and realise that not even they know this; that perhaps they are not capable of thought. Either that, or their thoughts are concerned with subjects so remote from anything I consider to be ‘thoughts’ as to make any comparison pointless. So instead I concentrate on the details. They are trying to reach the ghost in the wall and the ghost in the wall appears to be a white horse being ridden by a very hairy man. The first and smallest unicorn, the only one without a horn, is pawing at the wall imploringly, as if to stroke the horse’s shank: ‘please come out of the wall oh ghost-horse, join us on this side.’ The middle of the three larger unicorns, the small unicorn’s mother, perhaps, is muttering something under her breath. But where is ‘this side’? The room in which a large basin glides above the ground, its contents bubbling madly, a red picture hanging on the wall, and what appears to be a starfish with an eye at the end of each limb or tentacle or whatever the pointy bits of a star are called. White water birds emerging from a state of disappearance or nonbeing, and seeming to take off from the floor. And I am trying to remember where I saw all this, because I have seen it before, have even had a conversation, or tried to, with the rider, one Colm Walker from County Wicklow, but he could not speak because he was too busy watching the unicorns and because he was condemned to remain forever on the other side, and because like all ghosts, he was a creature of habit, and he would never change.

Email Subscription

The Lonely City is an exquisite meditation on loneliness, but it is also so much more. Laing explores the lives of a handful on American artists who knew loneliness well, and whose work often references that state,... Read More

Ryzsard Kapuściński was a Polish writer who spent most of his working life as a roving foreign correspondent for the Polish state news agency (PAP) during the Communist era, but his own writings, in the form of personal... Read More

Having fallen ill on the last day of teaching, the accumulated tensions of the semester finally erupting in an onslaught of snot, fever, and a hideous, raucous cough, I take to my bed in the hope... Read More

There are few ideas more mind-blowing than that of the multiverse, and the notion that the universe is perpetually dividing into parallel universes, each of them containing versions of ourselves. Long before I’d ever heard of the multiverse,... Read More